Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Feminist Interventions in International Communication: Minding the Gap (Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture)

This cutting-edge work critiques today's global mediascape through feminist perspectives, highlighting concerns of policy, power, labor, and technology. Starting with the general state of international communications, the book uses feminist political-economic and policy analyses to explore the globalization of media industries, including questions about women's employment and media content that is globally produced and consumed. A top-notch group of authors covers cases on online news, pornography and explicit material, political participation and democracy, policies for women's development, violence against women, labor practices and information workers, print media and publishing, public 'telecentres,' media coverage of HIV/AIDS, and more. Providing fresh feminist insights into international communication, this essential book shows the important strides taken toward women's justice in these areas and how far there is yet to go. Review When feminist categories of analysis are brought to bear on the world of the new information technologies the result can be exciting and unfamiliar. Sarikakis and Shade have brought together a highly diverse group of such scholars and given us one of the more extraordinary texts I have seen on the new technologies. Together these authors open up the field with their original studies and deborder established propositions with gusto and brio.--Saskia Sassen, author of The Global City Feminist Interventions in International Communication is exactly what we all need right now. Together, these smart editors and authors reveal the connections between media's representation of women, women as workers in this burgeoning industry, and the structural trends of global media. They show us all what a feminist curiosity about global media can reveal.--Cynthia Enloe, author of Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link This text provides a useful review of the literature about gender differences in news consumption.--Debra Merskin, University of Oregon International communication research has badly needed a collection such as this one for a very long time. If any book is likely to give the field a much-needed shot in the arm, this is it. The variety of its contents and the freshness of the analyses are genuinely stimulating. It will probably set off new research initiatives globally.--John Downing, Southern Illinois University About the Author Katharine Sarikakis is senior lecturer in communications policy and director of the Centre for International Communications Research at the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds. She is the author of Powers in Media Policy (Peter Lang 2004) and British Media in a Global Era (Arnold 2004), co-author of Media Policy and Globalization (Edinburgh University Press 2006), and the co-editor of Ideologies of the Internet (Hampton Press 2006). Leslie Regan Shade is associate professor at Concordia University's Department of Communication Studies in Montreal. She is the author of Gender and the Social Construction of the Internet (Peter Lang 2002), co-editor of Mediascapes: New Patterns in Canadian Communication (Nelson Thomson 2006), and co-editor of the Communications in the Public Interest series published by the Canadian Centre on Policy Alternatives.